Thailand and Cambodia begin UN-backed conciliation on maritime dispute

For more than 25 years, Cambodia and Thailand have both laid claim to about 26,000 square kilometres of sea in the Gulf of Thailand, an area estimated to hold nearly 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and large quantities of oil with a value of about $300 billion.

The neighbours signed a pact in 2001 to develop a framework to jointly exploit the energy resources in the so-called "overlapping claims area" but Thailand terminated the agreement in May, a fallout of deadly border clashes last year.

In June, Cambodia announced it had launched a compulsory conciliation process under UNCLOS, where a panel of independent experts examines a dispute and makes recommendations, although its findings are not legally binding on either party.

The UN-backed mechanism has, so far, only been used by East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, to successfully resolve a decades-long maritime dispute with Australia.

(Reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by John Mair)